Using Data in Fund Development Work
Anyone who knows me well knows that I love data! I firmly believe that we make better decisions based on objective facts than we do simply trusting our guts.
Fund development work follows that rule as well. The more you can base your work and prioritize your time by following the data, the more efficiently and effectively you can use your time. And, let’s face it, fund development professionals rarely can afford to waste time, so finding ways to make your time most productive can lessen your burnout risk while bolstering your organization and its mission.
Let me give you some examples of how data can help you work smarter, not harder to illustrate my point.
Before sitting down to write this blog post, I reviewed a list of more than 200 previous donors to a nonprofit client to identify who might have the capacity and inclination to make a major gift to them. Limited staff time means that you likely cannot contact all 200 people immediately or maybe even this year, so who should you contact first? You could methodically go through the list alphabetically or by zip code, but you might miss someone whose name falls to the bottom of the list that might have become your next leadership donor if you had contacted them sooner. Data – internal and external to your organization – can help you find these “diamonds in the rough.”
I worked with another client to identify their most significant generous donors from their database. They had a good list that we used to identify major gift prospects. However, using only internal data missed a person who an externally screened list estimated has a giving capacity of $616,800. This person has only given $1,000 total to this organization so did not make the top donor lists but with wealth like that, they might, with proper cultivation, become a major or transformational donor. Without the data, we would never find them.
Likewise, after you host an event, you want to review the people who attended to identify who has the wealth to continue to support your mission at a higher dollar amount. These people just spent a few hours getting to know more about your organization, mission, leaders, and clients and, hopefully, having a good time. Follow-up to ask them to continue to invest in your mission. But you can’t have coffee with all 300 people who came to your event; data can help you prioritize your time to call the most promising prospects first. Who knows, maybe you will raise enough money outside of your events that you can cancel a few of them and spend your time working with individual donors!
Too often, I hear fund development staff who either prefer the relationship aspect of their work (hurray!) and dread the thought of sitting behind the computer to dig into the data or who cannot find (or make) time in their day to do so because they feel the pressure to get out and raise money. I hope these examples demonstrate the importance of taking the time and effort to assure that you have good, up-to-date data upon which to base your fund development plan and decisions as it will save you time – and raise more money – in the long run.
